Literary Hero Worship

By

Francis X. Rocca

Updated Jan. 19, 2008 12:01 a.m. ET

Night Train to Lisbon By Pascal Mercier Grove, 438 pages, $25

A middle-aged Swiss high-school teacher browsing in a second-hand bookshop comes across a collection of essays by a writer he has never heard of, in a language (Portuguese) he has never studied. Picking through the text with the aid of a dictionary, he is enthralled by the writer's reflections on the difficulty of expressing ideas and experience in words. Within hours,...